Well, don't get the Thinkpad for better speakers. Speaking as an owner of a new t480s, whose dumb idea was to put speakers on the bottom of the case? My lap don't have ears. Of course the battery life is even worse than the bad 2016 Macbook, not by much though. But it's not whatever double digit hours they claim. If you think apple makes nonsensical design decisions, try any windows laptop, apple is still miles ahead in certain areas. Windows is so bad it's not even funny anymore (for example cortana guided setup is disturbing) and don't get me started about linux.

What's wrong with Linux? Its support for Thinkpad hardware is pretty exceptional, it just isn't great at holding your hand.

If by holding your hand you mean stuff works out of the box, then yes it isn't great. I did manage to get hidpi working in just 1-2 days (not with wayland, nothing works on wayland, let's give it just 5 more years and I'm sure it will happen), and it also goes to sleep fine, trackpad is not as bad as I expected it to be. All perfectly great achievements for 2018.

xubuntu versions running perfectly on my Thinkpad E550 (and Desktop) for many years already. Raspbian on my PI's and ubuntu on my beaglebone black. Don't settle for the provided software configuration. Settle for the open tool that is made for support.

Not sure why a laptop really needs better speakers (or even any speakers) both of mine are permanently hooked up to headphones.

Because some people dont like to use headphones. Some couples prefer watching a movie in bed.

Easily solved with a Bluetooth speaker, unlike say dust-vulnerable KBs...

What if you dont carry your speaker everywhere?

your scenario was about a couple watching movies in bed, though...

To be honest, I really love my rMBP 2014 hardware, it was basically perfect. Great speaker, as you say, good enough keyboard, BEST display, etc.

If Apple releases another MBP based on 2015 I'll take a quite good look again.

I only use my laptop when I am traveling. At home, I have no need for it. I am not traveling with speakers. I doubt I am alone.

Are you really going to carry around a bluetooth speaker in everyroom though, if someone wants to watch it on the couch?

How many rooms in a house do people really watch movies in? A couple of bluetooth speakers covers the 95% case, and just using the crappy laptop speakers or use earbuds or headphones for the 5% case.

Of course it would be nicer if the laptop had better speakers in it, but there are always trade-offs to be made on cost vs benefit, and fairly cheap bluetooth speakers are a pretty good workaround for a lot of people.

Not sure why you call the macbooks speakers crappy, i would imagine most people would consider them good enough and be happy with then instead of dealing with external Bluetooth speakers and carrying them around with the laptop.

My comment wasn't meant to be macbook specific. Most laptop speakers don't sound as nice as a reasonable set of bluetooth speakers or headphones. The main point of my comment was to counter the (strawman) idea that the only option for someone who didn't like the laptop speaker was to carry around a bluetooth speaker with them from room to room, which is of course not very practical. But having a couple of them strategically placed in the house is affordable and practical for most cases.

Now instead of a room think about a house or a office, is your idea of carrying a speaker everywhere still practical or do you think adding a speakers on laptop is more practical?

I think you've misread/misunderstood my comment. I'm trying to say that carrying around a bluetooth speaker IS impractical (and the initial criticism of it a type of strawman argument because it's obviously impractical). I'm not suggesting in any way that carrying around a speaker everywhere is a good idea (it's not).

What I'm trying to say is that if really good audio quality is important to you, then having a couple of sets of bluetooth speakers in your house strategically placed in the places where you'd regularly watch movies or consume other high-quality audio is a reasonable workaround for a lot of people. OF COURSE having better speakers (equivalent in sound quality to the bluetooth workaround) in your laptop would be better if you care a lot about audio quality. But that would add to the cost of the laptop for every user, even the ones that don't care about having really high-quality audio on their laptop. I'm saying that it's not unreasonable for a manufacturer to make some tradeoffs like that when there are workarounds that work fairly well.

Over time the costs of adding higher-end features like this drop, and things like audio quality improve to the point that the workarounds aren't needed (the audio quality of my phone speaker is actually pretty amazing).

Do people not have TVs?

By a strange coincidence I'm also in the group of people using their Macbook Pro while sitting on the sofa, due to not having a tv. I wouldn't use a dedicated TV enough to justify having one.

I dont know about others but I dont have a TV.

Ah like the annoying teenagers on the bus sodcasting

Why would you even argue for bad speakers for laptops? Of course a laptop should have good speakers..

I was checking Yoga from Lenovo and or Matebook X

https://consumer.huawei.com/en/laptops/matebook-x-pro/